Pamukkale University The Institute of Social Sciences
Doctoral Thesis
The Department of English Language and Literature English Language and Literature
PhD Programme
Ayşe DEMİR
Supervisor
Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL
AUGUST 2020 DENİZLİ
To my children Oğuz Kağan & Aylin Ece
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to present my gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL for his endless motivation, precious suggestions and guidance not only for this dissertation but also for his contributions throughout my education. I should also thank Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mustafa ŞAHİNER, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Cumhur Yılmaz MADRAN and Assist. Prof. Dr. Meltem UZUNOĞLU ERTEN for their constructive feedbacks during my studies. I am a very lucky person to have so many precious people in my life. I should present my sincerest feelings to Assist. Prof. Dr. Hakan Can SÖYLEYİCİ, Assist. Prof. Dr. Devrim HÖL and Dr. Mustafa BÜYÜKGEBİZ for the times that they have engaged my mind with useful stuff. I need to thank my sister-like colleague, Inst. Siren BURAK because she is with me whenever I need her and her motivating speeches have always made my way. I also owe special thanks to Inst. Şeyma AKTAŞ for not only the sleepless nights and cups of coffees she has shared with me, but for her hard but useful criticisms on my studies, as well. The technical support and motivational contributions of Pınar EKİN GÜZELDERE have been of great value for me, so I also should thank her for her support.
All my family members did their best for me during my studies, but my father Memduh DEMİR and especially my mother Beyhan DEMİR deserve special thanks for their unlimited support in every aspect. If I can do something, this is only possible with their contributions and perseverance.
Lastly, I have to apologize to my son Oğuz Kağan EKİCİ and my daughter Aylin Ece EKİCİ for the times I could not be with them due to my studies and I am indebted for their patience and tolerance in all these hard times. It would not be too daring to say that I feel so blessed to have them with me.
ABSTRACT
POSTCOLONIAL JUXTAPOSITION AND ILLUSIONS IN TIMOTHY MO’S FICTION
Demir, Ayşe Doctoral Thesis
The Department of English Language and Literature The Doctoral Programme in English Language and Literature
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL August 2020, vii + 113 Pages
The post-colonial period brings a different form to the individuals and nations’ lives. The nations that were once colonized regain their independence, but the traces of colonialism can still be observed in their lives. In order to get adapted, people need to redefine the established ways of thinking, and this is the point where the subject matter of this dissertation, post-colonial juxtapositions and illusions, emerges.
As a writer who has an Anglo-Chinese background, Timothy Mo’s fiction is a true medium to analyse the juxtapositions and illusions within post-colonial context. Since the post-colonial illusion of having a new life engages the minds of the protagonists of the novels within the scope of this dissertation, they end up looking for ways out of their borders. Thus, discontented with their current circumstances, they leave their home and they set up a new life in a new environment. However, the post-colonial juxtapositions start to hunt their lives since they mostly live as immigrants or expatriates in a foreign setting. It appears to be a compulsion for them to be there for a better life, at the same time, they strive to go away since they cannot feel themselves as a part of the whole. Stuck in this vicious circle, people need to form new identities conforming to the post-colonial world.
Being an outsider becomes an imposed identity on the people who live in post-colonial world. Hence, the cast away, discriminated, oppressed individuals; namely the outsiders form the basis of this dissertation, which is aimed at analysing Timothy Mo’s selected novels; The Redundancy of Courage, Renegade or Halo2, Sour Sweet and The Monkey King in terms of the post-colonial juxtapositions and illusions.
ÖZET
TIMOTHY MO’NUN YAZININDA SÖMÜRGECİLİK SONRASI DÖNEM KARŞITLIKLARI VE YANILSAMALARI
Demir, Ayşe Doktora Tezi
İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Ana Bilim Dalı İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Doktora Programı Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL
Ağustos 2020, vii + 113 sayfa
Sömürgecilik sonrası dönem, bireylerin ve ulusların hayatlarına farklı bir yaşam biçimi getirmiştir. Bir zamanlar sömürgeleştirilen uluslar bağımsızlıklarını geri kazanırlar, ancak sömürgeciliğin izleri yaşamlarında hala görülmeye devam etmektedir. Adapte olabilmek için insanların yerleşik düşünce biçimlerini yeniden tanımlamaları gerekir ve burası tam olarak mevcut tezin konusu olan, sömürgecilik sonrası karşıtlık ve yanılsamaların ortaya çıktığı noktadır.
Çin kökenli, İngiliz yazar Timothy Mo’nın yazını, sömürgecilik sonrası bağlamdaki karşıtlık ve yanılsamaları analiz etmek için uygun metinler sunmaktadır. Sömürgecilik sonrası yeni bir hayata sahip olma yanılsaması, bu tez kapsamındaki romanların kahramanlarının zihinlerini meşgul ettiğinden, çareyi kendi sınırlarının dışına çıkabilmenin yollarını aramakta bulurlar. Mevcut durumlarından hoşnut olmayan bu insanlar, evlerinden ayrılırlar ve yeni bir ortamda yeni bir hayata başlarlar. Bununla birlikte, sömürgecilik sonrası karşıtlıklar çoğunlukla yabancı bir ortamda göçmen ya da geçici yabancı işçi olarak yaşayanların hayatlarının üzerine çökmeye başlar. Daha iyi bir yaşam için orada bulunmaları bir zorunluluk olarak görünmektedir, ancak kendilerini bir bütünün parçası olarak hissedemedikleri için aynı zamanda oradan kurtulmaya çalışırlar. Bu kısır döngüde sıkışıp kalan insanların sömürgecilik sonrası dünyaya uygun yeni kimlikler oluşturmaları gerekir.
Yabancılık, sömürgecilik sonrası dünyada yaşayan insanlara dayatılan bir kimliktir. Bu nedenle, kenara itilen, ayrımcılığa uğrayan, ezilen; yani yabancılaştırılmış bireyler, Timothy Mo’nun The Redundancy of Courage, Renegade or Halo2, Sour Sweet ve The Monkey King romanlarını sömürgecilik sonrası karşıtlık ve yanılsamalar açısından analiz eden bu tezin temelini oluşturmaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Timothy Mo, karşıtlık, yanılsama, sömürge sonrası söylem, yazın
TABLE OF CONTENTS PLAGIARISM...i DEDICATION...ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...iii ABSTRACT...iv ÖZET ……….………....v TABLE OF CONTENTS...vi INTRODUCTION……….………...1 CHAPTER ONE THEORETICAL BACKGROUND………...6 CHAPTER TWO THE REDUNDANCY OF COURAGE ………...…..25
2.1 Illusion of Media ………..31
2.2 Identity………..36
2.3 East & West ……...………...37
2.4 Nationhood & Globalization………..39
2.5 Cutlrual Identity……….40 CHAPTER THREE RENEGADE OR HALO2 ……….45 3.1 Title………46 3.2 Decontextualisation ………..51 3.3 Slavery………..51
3.4 Tribalism/ Community & Individual Choices ………..52
3.5 Being a Hero in the Modern World: Picaro ………..54
3.6 Exile & Expatriate & Immigrant ………..56
3.7 Subservience ……….57
3.8 Questioning the Communal & Individual Morality ……….60
3.9 Language ………..61
CHAPTER FOUR SOUR SWEET………..64
4.1 Tradition (Li) & Individual (Yi)………...72
4.2 Yin &Yang ………...73
4.3 The Illusionary Effect of the Media ………76
4.4 The Triad Society ……….78
4.5 Title: “Sour” & “Sweet” ………..79
CHAPTER FIVE THE MONKEY KING………81
5.1 Legendary Monkey King ………...84
5.2 Pre-defined Identities………....87
5.3 The Clash of Individual Values & Established Practices ………...89
5.4 Village ………...93
CONCLUSION………... 99
REFERENCES……….106
INTRODUCTION
Literature is the reflection of real life. Over the centuries, not only the drastic changes, wars, revolutions that have a great impact on history, but also the unchanged universal themes such as love, death etc. have been the subject matter of literature. One of these focus points of literature is human beings’ thirst for power. Although people used to battle against nature in ancient times; in time, it has been evolved into a man-to-man rivalry. Therefore, in this world order, it has become a reality that whoever has the power dominates over the other. This, at the same time, brings out terms like oppression, exploitation and manipulation to the stage of history. When the phenomenon is extended to the global scale, it is called “colonization”.
In its simplest terms, what colonizers do is simply using their power to manipulate those in weaker position. Since those who do not have capability to defend themselves cannot defy them, the colonizers take advantage of this, and it marks the beginning of exploitation which, as a multi-faceted topic that will be explained in detail and discussed all through this dissertation, is a key term to grasp the colonial context. Although colonial process covers many other issues as well, the scope of this thesis is more related to the end of colonialism; namely, the colonial period. It would not be weird to call post-colonialism as the awakening of nations. Once the exploited nations become conscious about the unfair treatments imposed on them and gather the necessary power and courage, they try to regain their independence no matter what it costs; this is regarded as the end of colonialism and the point where the postcolonial era starts.
The colonial agencies deem people under their reign to submit to their sovereignty. The way they do this is through the ideological apparatuses as enounced by Louis Althusser. He claims that “the division between fiction and truth, between ideology and the real, are wholly internal to ideology” (Williams, 2002: 34). That is to say, the dominant ideology shapes the lives of people and their ways of thinking in the colonial world. However, it is inevitable that there appears a gap between the reality and the illusionary disposal created by the states. Marxist critics claim this gap as the overt and covert structure in a society. While the overt structure is the legitimized one, they unveil the covert meanings through social structures, class conflicts and historical construction of the societies. The covert structure and the illusions also form the basis of this dissertation, but this will be through post-colonial perspective.
In fact, the focus of this dissertation is on the post-effects of colonialism, because even when the colonial reign is not going on actively, the hereafter results can still be detected. The people living under these circumstances share similar troubles. Hong Kong, as a former British colony for instance, is a true example to trace post-colonialism. It is a setting which will frequently be mentioned in this study. Timothy Mo, the writer of the novels analysed in this thesis, is Hong-Kong born, and it is a preferred setting in his novels because it suits the post-colonial frame with the ex-colonised people living with the ongoing colonial effects on their lives.
Migration turns out to be one of the most distinct results of the new order post-colonial world brings into the lives of people. When people coming from different backgrounds change their living places, this affects not only these people as minorities, but the already-existing order they move into undergoes drastic changes, as well. That is to say, the demographic structure changes through immigrants. The interchanging of relations between cultures leads to a reconstructed type of society. The language used by people, working conditions, food culture and social values are all the things that are affected at first. Also, due to the differences between cultures, a chaotic atmosphere is very likely to emerge because as well as people who welcome the multicultural outcome of migration, there are also the conservative nationalists who reject people from other ethnic backgrounds. Therefore, the anti-immigrant host societies make it more difficult for the already restless immigrants to get integrated into the society.
The immigrant literature has gained significance due to the increasing number of multi-cultural societies in the globalized world of modern age. Especially in recent centuries, people in the literary world have pointed the issue that there is a reality of immigrant population. The problems arising from their existence, the troubles they cause have attracted both the readers’ and the writers’ attention. However, as Gayatri Spivak states in her well-known Can the Subaltern Speak?, the voice of subaltern has not been heard in Western literature until post-colonial writers like V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Hanif Kureishi and Timothy Mo started to write about the immigrant experience. Although their subject matters seem to be the same with their Western contemporaries, these writers let people see the other side of the conflict and denote the presence of minorities in the Western world from their point of view. In other words, the immigrant experience has started to be told by the people who experience it, not from an outsider’s angle.
Timothy Mo, one of these pioneer writers in post-colonial literature, narrates the presence of Chinese minority in Western literature. Most of his protagonists are immigrant people living in diaspora, and either the alien culture they move into or their own ethnic background causes troubles for these characters. The terms Timothy Mo’s novels preoccupied with are mostly the subjugation and displacement of individuals, the resulting identity crisis, the marginal characters’ integration or disallowance into a new society.
As a writer who was born from a Cantonese father and an English mother in Hong-Kong and educated there during his childhood, Timothy Mo spends many years of his life in England, which leads him to experience all the troubles of being a non-native in a foreign setting. Timothy Mo experiences the discrepancies of being an outsider in all walks of his life. That is why, it is not surprising to see that most of the themes he applies in his novels, the topics he deals with, even the protagonists of his novels are derived from his own experiences. What is more, his two-sided way of living enables him the gift to observe both cultures equally, as well. In his novels it is possible to see that he keeps himself at a fair distance to both sides; you can find him in such instances as boasting something about English or Chinese culture at one point while criticizing the same one at another. This is also something that differentiates him from the other fellow writers who either favour the strong with a Westernized point of view or advocate the weak.
Timothy Mo has seven novels and four of them, namely, The Redundancy of
Courage, Renegade or Halo2, Sour Sweet and The Monkey King are the ones to be
analysed in this study. The Redundancy of Courage is a novel based on the confiscation of Danu Island by the malais. The people living in this fictional island struggle against the invaders. Adolph Ng., the protagonist-narrator of the novel, is caught between the two fires. However, his adaptability lets him survive this conflict, and he restarts his life in exile in Brazil. The novel can be referred to as a fictional account of the events following the invasion and occupation of East Timor by Indonesia. The other novel in the scope of this dissertation, Renegade or Halo, is narrated by Rey Castro. As a boy grown up in the suburbs of Philippines, Rey’s life is changed completely upon his involvement in a crime. Though he is a member of underclass, he is to become a lawyer and dreams to move off the prejudices against his ethnic background through education. However, the values of the tribe he is required to be a part of do not let him make his own way. Therefore, he becomes a wanderer who cannot escape from being the cast away whichever society he goes into. Sour Sweet (1982) is a novel based on familial relations. Chen and Lily, a
newly married couple immigrate to London from China. Their little son, Man Kee and Lily’s sister Mui are the immadiate family members who experience the turmoils of being foreigners in an alien setting together with Chen couple. Lily and Chen have different character traits, which also changes the way they perceive the events. Their lives also end up in different ways; while Lily becomes a hybrid that can sustain her and the other family members’ lives, Chen is suspiciously killed. The last novel to be analyzed in this dissertation is Mo’s prize winning first novel, The Monkey King. As a novel set in colonial Hong Kong, the tensions between Wallace Nolasco and his father-in-law Mr. Poon are narrated in the novel. Coming from a completely different background, Nolasco cannot get easily adapted to the order of Poon family. While attempting to gain acceptance on one side, he tries to set himself free from Mr. Poon’s oppressions. Following his departure to Mainland China, Nolasco finds his true self and upon his return, everything becomes different.
In order to handle the post-colonial juxtapositions and illusions in every aspect, the novels have been selected in terms of their subject matters. While it is possible to have a look at the post-colonial juxtapositions and illusions from individual and familial perspectives in Sour Sweet and The Monkey King; The Redundancy of Courage and
Renegade or Halo2 are the novels that provide an insight into the communal and national
frame of post-colonialism. Intended as a narrowing down plan from general to specific, the first theoretical chapter that covers the necessary background information for the analysis of the novels will be followed by a second chapter with the name of The
Redundancy of Courage for dealing with the post-colonial juxtapositions and illusions on
the nation-wide level. The third chapter, Renegade or Halo2, will focus on the adventures of Rey Castro with his communal membership. The novel of fourth chapter, Sour Sweet takes a Chinese couple to the centre of events and looks into their new life as immigrants in London. The last chapter is centred on Wallace Nolasco in The Monkey King, as an individual trying to be integrated into the Poon family as an outsider. All these novels treat post-colonial illusions from different perspectives, and the aim of this dissertation is to cover the topic in all aspects with explanations and examples from the above mentioned novels.
As a contemporary writer of the last century, Timothy Mo takes a prominent place in literature. Thus, his works have been studied by those who are concerned with immigrant experiences, cultural identities and the livings of ethnic people within the post-colonial context. Elaine Ho, a professor at The University of Hong Kong, has published
many articles and a book on Mo’s fiction. Her detailed analysis about each novel guides the scholars as well as providing general background information for the people who would be interested in Mo’s works. In addition to Ho, there are also some studies that focus on Timothy Mo’s novels from different angles like, food, gender, immigration and cultural discourse; however, this dissertation differs from the other works in its dealing with the post-colonial juxtapositions and illusions specifically. The relationship between the colonizer and the colonized has been a common subject matter studied in literature, but the fact that juxtapositions like colonized people’s dichotomy between integrating or refraining from the others and their conflicting identities with the host societies; as well as the illusions provided by the colonizers and the new world illusions of individuals embodied in the post-colonial world has not been correlated in one study like this dissertation. Timothy Mo’s novels have been taken as the medium for this research because the contents and the figures of his novels provide the due material for studying these tenets in detail.
CHAPTER I
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
The subject matter of literary works mostly bears the traces of the era they are written in. It is difficult to pinpoint an exact boundary for labeling these works, but in terms of their common aspects, they can be classified. The authors who write about the struggles of the nations which were colonized once or current colonies, for instance, are merged under the name of the Post-colonial literature, which gains importance in the last quarter of the 20th century. Since then, the problems that the colonized nations encounter have been the topics that are worked through from a variety of angles in literature. What makes this study peculiar is that further than the relation between the colonizer and the colonized, the juxtapositions and the illusions resulting from the cultural clashes and the identity crises within post-colonial context are thoroughly discussed. For this reason, post-colonialism appears to be the right setting to ground the theory of this dissertation. Thus, the focus of this study is mainly on one of the post-colonial writers, Timothy Mo’s fiction, and it aims at exploring the juxtapositions and the illusions in his selected works. In order to make a detailed analysis, reflecting on the theoreticians’ premises, this chapter provides theoretical background within a post-colonial frame.
To begin with, Colonialism- a movement that has long been studied in literature from different aspects- is mainly accepted to be based on the domination of European imperial powers on their colonies. Thus, the two basic parts of colonial studies are the colonizer and the colonized. Following this movement, Post-Colonialism moves beyond merely the colonizer and the colonized relationship, and the post-colonial theory focuses on “the relations between ideas and practices: relations of harmony, relations of conflict, generative relations between different peoples and their cultures” (Young, 2003: 7). Hence, post-colonial studies are mainly about the after-effects of the colonial period. The end of colonialism starts at the point where the colonized ones became aware of their power as a self-nation and started to fight for their freedom. In this respect, the colonial motives for exploiting everything in the colonies were encountered with the resistance of colonies. One of the peculiar examples of this struggle is Indians’ success to get their freedom from British colony in 1947. Following the period in which the nations that used to be the colonies before starting to gain their independence worldwide, the term “post-colonial” was coined in 1970s and started to be used commonly for “the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period”
(Ashcroft et al, 2002: 7). The word- “post-colonial” has become a referential word for the new period in which the ex-colonies reconstruct themselves and their attempts to reformulate their historical, social and political positions.
Post-colonial literature deals mainly with the nations which were “other”ed by the dominant imperial powers. There has been much discussion on how to identify these “other” nations; whether to exclude the power agencies that have shaped the relations in the world for so long and determine these nations’ economic, social and historical existence; or to take the mutual interactions between these nations into consideration by also focusing on their peculiar national traits. What Post-colonial studies make possible to talk about is a multicultural narration free from the dominant ideologies. Thus, Post-colonialism paves the way to search for the notions of home, language, race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, displacement, resistance and all the other terms that are used for defining the identities of multi-cultured post-colonial nations.
Before giving the details of other Post-colonial concepts, the notion of culture should be recounted at first hand since it is core to define the Post-colonial relations of nations. Culture can be defined as how people make sense of the world in which they live individually and how they live among others. Hence, there is a cultural identity that keeps the people who share the same things together. Stuart Hall notes that:
“There are at least two different ways of thinking about 'cultural identity'. The first position defines 'cultural identity' in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self', hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves', which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people', with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history” (Hall, 1995: 223).
What Hall claims as the first way of looking at culture is “oneness”; people inevitably live in a society, and there is a collective entity that is shared by the members of the culture they belong to. However, in the colonization process, the emerging hybrid societies offer a new means of deconstructing the boundaries of the cultures. The second view of culture that is proposed by Hall is that:
“as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather - since history has intervened - 'what we have become'. We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about ‘one experience, one identity’, without acknowledging its other side” (Hall, 1995: 225).
In other words, this second way is “becoming”, which means that the societies go through changes and are transformed into different forms. In addition to their different cultural background and their roots, the base of new formed societies is comprised of individual or public interactions that also affect the people’s social positions, social roles, economic structures, policies, values and perceptions. To make it clear, Homi Bhabha states that “the transnational dimension of cultural transformation -- migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation -- makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification” (1994: 247). The societies have been shaped through these social changes. During this socialization process, people take their cultures, languages and lifestyle with them when they change their living places and interact with the other people. In this case, the emergence of the societies turns out to be a matter of belonging, and individuals’ experiences gain different meanings in terms of the society they live in. This sense of belonging, which will also be studied in detail in this dissertation, is something almost all the colonized nations experience. Thus, the people who were eradicated from their own culture and locations cannot stick to their real inherent identities and become strangers; neither can they comply with the new social formation they are involved in. Hence, in Bhabha’s terms, they become hybrid beings that have nowhere to pertain to, and there appears an unavoidable identity crisis awaiting the people living in this third space.
Homi Bhabha, one of the pioneers of Post-colonial studies, is the one who raises the question of cultural identities of colonized cultures. Bhabha states in his The Location
of Culture that colonizers and the colonized are mutually bonded to each other in
constructing a shared culture. The fact that there is a “Third Space of Enunciation” in which cultural systems are constructed is what Bhabha brings into the Post-colonial studies, and the domain of this study is mainly this third space Bhabha points. In addition to “the third space”, Homi Bhabha offers many concepts like hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry in order to define the cultural relations between the colonizer and colonized and especially how the individual and national identities are formed within Post-colonial context. In order to unearth these agencies in Timothy Mo’s fiction, the key concepts such as hybridity, ambivalence and mimicry will be elaborated.
Among the other Post-colonial terms, one of the most commonly used key features that forge Post-colonial identity is hybridity. In Post-colonial discourse, hybridity “is celebrated and privileged as a kind of superior cultural intelligence owing to the advantage of in-betweeness, the straddling of two cultures and the consequent ability to negotiate the difference” (Hoogvelt 1997: 158).
Although it seems to be a term that becomes well-known by Homi Bhabha, it has been used long before and means more than “a single idea or a unitary concept, hybridity is an association of ideas, concepts, and themes that at once reinforce and contradict each other” (Kraidy, 2005: vi). In addition to its other usages that predicate the mingling of two different parties, hybridity has been proposed as a counter concept to the dominant cultural imperialism that prevailed the perception of culture until 1960s. The main problem about the dominant understanding of culture is that it did not reflect the complexity of multicultural relations within and across cultures:
“Since hybridity involves the fusion of two hitherto relatively distinct forms, styles, or identities, cross-cultural contact, which often occurs across national borders as well as across cultural boundaries, is a requisite for hybridity” (Kraidy, 2005: 5).
Hybridity is mainly the bodily representation of the colonizer and the colonized and a concept that connotes a new formation. Prayer Elmo Raj claims that hybridity is: “a cultural transactive creating a temporal interactive sequential between the colonizer and the colonized bestowing a conciliation inestimably concussive beyond the managed identity of the dominant (Raj, 2014: 125).
As Bhabha’s idea of “third space” brings forth, when the different nations meet, they cannot remain as distinct and separate ones divided through a strict line, so new and hybrid societies emerge together with their interactions with one another. Thus, with the encounter of cultures, the process of hybridization becomes visible, as Bhabha states: “it is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity, that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (Bhabha, 1994: 37).
In the third space, in fact each nation owes their beliefs and traditions; however, their values are shaped through social relations either by resisting or by reflecting on the others. On the one side, there are different peculiar cultural backgrounds; on the other side, the new social conditions force them to comply with unfamiliar or foreign settings of racial, religious, literary and cultural codes. Bhabha defines “these ‘new men’ as ‘the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither the One… nor the Other… but something else besides, which contests the terms and territories of both” (Morrison, 2014: 48). Thus, the basic thing to inquire is what the newly emerging hybrid society’s nature is? Should it be accepted as a novel identity that is the result of cultural exchanges or as mimicry of the dominant ideology? Bhabha explains the process of mimicry as:
“the representation of a difference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which “appropriates” the Other as it visualizes power” (1984: 126).
Mimicry means for the colonized nations, borrowing and imitating the colonizers’ language, culture and codes and mimicking all these so that they can be integrated into the host society. For Homi Bhabha, “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable ‘Other’, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (1994: 122). The immigrants, who have been to a place different from their mother land, display a tendency to pick up the things s/he saw in the other culture. When the case is settling down into another nation’s borders as minority, mimicry seems a much more possible way of setting a new identity for the new comers.
Mimicry “emerges as one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge” (Bhabha 1994: 122). Bhabha distinguishes mimicry from hybridity. To exemplify, hybridity is like putting two cups of liquid into one bowl- the amounts of them may change for sure, and the emerging mix is what he calls “hybrid”. However, mimicry is like the wipe’s absorbing the liquid; it is penetrated inside. In Bhabha’s terms, mimicry occurs when the colonizer is a snake in the grass and speaks in “a tongue that is forked” (Bhabha 1994: 122).
In the Post-colonial discourse, the theoreticians like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said pointed out the cultural pluralism, and their ideas led to the search for other ways of defining cultures and individuals in Post-colonial context. Gayatri Spivak’s well-known question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a milestone for the attempt to address the oppressive nature of the colonizers. She uses the term “subaltern” by borrowing from Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in order to stress the inferior positions of marginalized groups like women and minorities.
“Spivak can be said to be the first postcolonial theorist with a fully feminist agenda. That agenda includes the complexity of female writers with imperialism” (Bertens, 2007: 211). To put it in another way, she is the one who points out the double oppression females are exposed to in the patriarchal societies; Spivak claims that the females in the colonies are exploited twice due to the inferior position they are given, not only because they are disadvantaged due to their roots, but also they are women. While Bhabha’s idea of third space might spare an area for growing a relation without privilege, Spivak argues that subaltern is the one who is forbidden from speaking in Western context. In other words, while the third space is offered as a place for the symbiotic
relationship between colonizer and the colonized, Spivak claims that the colonized is expected to submit and not given the right to take an active part in this relationship just like women who are not given the right to speak in patriarchies.
Spivak criticizes not only the oppressive attitudes towards marginalized, but also the Euro-centric knowledge. She claims that it is the West that manages the assumptions about the Other. Through the use of the economic power and authority, the knowledge is also converted according to Western standards by ignoring and excluding Third World people:
“to consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline” (Spivak, 1985: 243). Spivak uses the term “worlding” to change the European based vision and to perceive the Third world in a different way. She rejects the idea that there is a pre-colonial pure past, because she believes that colonialism has affected the course of the events at a very large scale. It is the Western dominant ideologies that shape the world; however, she suggests understanding the “worlding” of the Third World by setting free from the denunciations of the West.
The clash between East and West is an issue that also finds a significant place in Edward Said’s books: Orientalism (1978) that contributes much to ground the theory of the Post-colonial studies and Culture and Imperialism (1993) in which his thoughts are evolved into dealing with the eastern and western relations. In Orientalism, he basically rejects the ideas imposed by the imperial powers of the West and denies the definitions and boundaries set by the Western world; in Culture and Imperialism, he rather focuses on the mutual relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, the east and the west.
Although Orientalism is not a term coined by Said, he is the one who is remembered mostly, for he uses and redefines the term by enabling the Third World people to be seen through a different angle just like Spivak. He defines Orientalism as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident” (Said, 1978: 9). His argument is mainly focused on the way the West perceives the East; however, he is firmly against the depictions of Europe as familiar and pronounced as “we” subject and the Orient as the strange and “they” or “other”.
Said explains his special concern on the encounter of West and East as not only an author and theoretician, but he is exposed to all the things he mentions in his individual life, as well. He states that:
“Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in those colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways, my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (Said, 1978: 33). Edward Said criticizes the fact that there is a stereotypical Western perception of Oriental which is mainly negative or inferior. The Orientals are believed to be barbaric, unreliable and uncivilized people. Their behaviors are not accepted as conforming to the rules of civilized West. This is a myth proposed by the Euro-centric thought, for sure. What Edward Said attempts to do is to dismantle this systematic idea stuck on the people of the East.
Said argues that it is not acceptable to ignore the cultural differences in the East and to put all the nations into one single category that is determined by the West. He points out a different perception of Oriental and claims Orientalism as:
“not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world” (Said, 1978: 20).
Under the influence of the European political dominance in Asia and The Middle East, Said emphasizes that the Orient has always been perceived as problematic, and the history written under this manipulative perspective should be approached speculatively. He is strongly influenced by the ideas of French philosopher, Michel Foucault. As he explains in his book, “yet unlike Michel Foucault, to whose work I am greatly indebted, I do believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (Said, 1978: 31). Moving from this idea, Said believes that the ethnic, formal and aesthetic ways of
Orient’s existence in the world come to the foreground, and they are worth being inquired. Edward said puts emphasis on the problem every writer in the Orient or every writer who writes about the Orient encounters. Since the power relations are unequal, and there is a fact that the writers adopt a narrative voice, he suggests them to be cautious when they write: “everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-à-vis the Orient” (Said, 1978: 28).
There is a common point which almost all the Post-colonial writers and theoreticians meet. Their ideas on the colonized nations and the deeds of colonizers are all based on the clashes between the East and the West, the colonizer and the colonized, the new-comers and the host nations. While the contradictions and differences within this Post-colonial context enrich the base of the societies, all the contradictory dimensions of the aforementioned arguments so far make it necessary to look into the nature of juxtapositions and the ways to find the reflections of this common theme that prevail the Post-colonial discourse in literature.
In fact, to accept the contradictions is to oppose the concept of purity offered by the Essentialist theories which reject complexity and difference, and reduce everything into single facts. Diana Fuss claims that:
“essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity … Importantly, essentialism is typically defined in opposition to difference” (1989: xi). In Post-colonial discourse, according to the theory of essentialism, there is or must be a shared culture which is unified. Salman Rushdie defines essentialism as “the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition” (1991:67). By denying the diversities, it turns out to be an idea that essentialist thought lets the colonizing powers make use of as a tool to assimilate or ignore the already existing backgrounds of the colonies. “The melting pot” image, which has been coined for people from different nationalities but living in America, is a sample for this essentialist perception. The idea proposes the people with different races to leave everything including traditions, assumptions, language, way of living and all the other things that make them different behind and become Americans.
Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, which is used for the colonized people’s pretending to be like the colonizer, results in another post-colonial term he offers - “ambivalence”. The basic thing about this term is its hosting contradictions within itself. Bhabha claims
that ambivalence refers to “a broader social framework where divergent cultural signs interact, intersect but fail to coincide with each other” (Papastergiadis, 1998: 47). The colonized nations which experience the in-betweenness and try to set up a new identity through mimicking the colonized, find themselves in an ambivalent situation. They experience a continuous fluctuation because the colonized people both want to be like the colonizers, and they want to keep their inherent identities at the same time. Thus, there is repulsion and attraction going hand in hand for the colonized, which is called in Bhabhian terms ambivalence.
What colonizing power looks for is the colonized nation’s acceptance of the values, assumptions and perceptions; however, colonized subjects might have different reactions to this demand: they can either reject submitting to the colonized by showing resistance, or they conform to the pre-existing or newly enforced rules. Under the influence of this ambivalence, the colonized people suffer from being dislocated and feel an ambiguity due to the sense of non-belonging in addition to loneliness and being “other”ed which will be exemplified through the plot and characters of Timothy Mo’s novels in the following parts of this study.
Ambivalence, which seems to be a problem for the colonized people, becomes in a way a threat against the authority and dominancy of colonizer at the same time. Despite the totalizing manners of colonies, the conclusion might turn out to be the emergence of hybrid nations. In this way, the colonizing powers also experience a kind of ambivalence. That is to say, the colonizers both want the colonized ones to be in their colonies, and they try to keep them away from themselves as much as they can. While the power and authority are centered on the colonizer, the colonized ones are expected to remain as margin. The colonized subjects are to have a confirmative attitude towards the rules set by them and show no resistance against their dominance, whereas the colonizers do not refrain from naming them as “other” and excluding or putting them aside in the society as strangers.
Since the mingling of cultures is a standing reality in the post-colonial discourse, the contradictions, differences, ambivalence and juxtapositions are the realities to be handled in this context. As one of the two key terms in this study, juxtaposition refers to “the fact of putting people or things together, especially in order to show a contrast or a new relationship between them”1. In simplest terms, two different items are set together
to be compared and contrasted. The writers and authors make use of juxtaposing as a technique in their works frequently because placing two divergent concepts, characters, ideas, or places next to each other lets the contrasts and the opposing figures be seen more easily and noticed clearly.
The juxtaposing elements can be used in a wide range of various ways in literature. The reader encounters temporal, spatial and interpersonal forms of juxtaposed items. Differing physical features like a strong man across a weak child may be sidled; or an ambitious, outgoing young girl can be countered with a passive, old man through personal traits; or the settings in the plots of the literary works can be contrasted like putting a peaceful setting like an old cottage next to a luxuriously decorated big mansion located in a busy district. There are also situational juxtapositions like the struggle between innocence and corruption; pleasure and pain might be depicted in the same place to emphasize one another’s presence; the apparent situation of the characters might be juxtaposed with a reverse reality; the characters can be drawn as having depression on one side and exaltation on the other. There might also be metaphorical juxtapositions like “a living dead” or conceptual juxtapositions that represent good versus evil. David H. Porter, who studies juxtapositions in the similes of Iliad, describes Homer’s style as using abundant clashes of “juxtaposition of the lovely with the ugly, the productive with the destructive, the gentle with the violent, the peaceful with the warlike” (1972: 12). His description of the opposing elements in the poem explains the nature of juxtaposition which enables the writer to increase the efficiency of the contrast:
“The grimness and bloodiness of the battlefield are inevitably rendered darker and more tragic by the constant brief glimpses we get in the similes of a world where milk flows, flowers and crops grow in the fields, shepherds tend their flocks, and small children play. Conversely, these momentary glimpses of the world of peace are made more idyllic and poignant by the panorama of violence and destruction which surrounds them” (Porter, 1972: 19).
Since language is seen as working in the same way a society is formed, finding out the linguistic features of juxtapositions and the differing components in the language help to perceive social relations, too. There is a parallel relationship between the formation of languages and the cultures; language is “a system of relationships, by producing a network of similarities and differences” (Sardar, 2005: 11). Based on Saussure’s philosophy of language, the signs or words are believed to gain their meanings through their binary oppositions. Black/white, on/off, male/female, sacred/profane, up/down, in/out, pure/impure… only have meaning in relation to its opposite. Just like
Terry Eagleton’s explanation on language and word formation: “‘cat’ is what it is because it is not ‘cad’ or ‘mat’, and ‘mat’ is what it is because it is not ‘map’ or ‘hat’” (1996:121) which supports the idea that it is their differences from each other that gives the signs their meanings. Saussure “shows that meaning in language, is a matter of contrasts between words and words, not between words and things. Meaning, that is to say is a network of differences” (Barry, 1995: 119). While Saussure divides the sign from the referent, in Post-structuralist thought, Jacques Derrida, by accepting Saussure’s argument that meaning is generated by relations of difference between signifiers rather than by reference to an independent object world, argues that the relation between the signifier and the signified is not stable.
“A sign can mean something only in a chain or system of differences. It must belong to some figuration in order to function…No meaning can be fully present in itself at any time because meaning always implies a reference elsewhere, to other signs and meanings” (Derrida 1976: 89).
To make it clear, one signifier has a signified, but then the signified becomes the signifier of another signified, and this vicious circle revolves forever. In this way, it is possible to say that this chain of relations contribute to the formation of the society too; in other words, in Post-colonial context, there is also a peculiar relationship between the colonized and colonizer which is also built upon these references and contrasts.
Looking basically at the juxtapositions in Post-colonial context, the most distinctive juxtaposition can be indicated within the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. There is an interaction that cannot be refrained from between the colonizer and colonized because there is and should be a social formation so that these nations can live together.
“If identity construction is a work of negotiation between discursive and material structures and subjects positioned within those structures, instances of power must be juxtaposed with those of resistance. The former invariably creates conditions for the latter to exist” (Kumar, 2010: 171).
In Post-colonial discourse, it is the supreme power having the agencies to conduct and exploit the submitting minority. In a way, it is the colonizers’ authority that determines the colonized nations’ limits. Together with the differences and varieties both parties have, the process of a new society’s coming into existence is formed and changed; however, the contrasts between them are in fact the main things that make “the other” meaningful. In other words, the colonized define themselves through their differences from the colonizer. On the one side, there is a settled, established and stated host culture;
on the other side, mobile immigrants changing their places by leaving many things behind, and in this context, colonized subjects have to confront with these realities and find themselves a place.
The term reality has been speculated, and what it really is has been searched for centuries. Different explanations have been attempted to put forward to point out the issue in a great numbers of various ways. However, the focus of this study is not on the realities, but on its counter- illusions that come to the foreground when the reality is questioned. Traditionally, illusion is defined as the moment when “you perceive a (worldly) object but you misperceive one or more of its properties” (Macpherson, 2016: 3). Illusions are widely regarded as a physical notion, as Smith explains “any perceptual situation in which a physical object is actually perceived, but in which that object perceptually appears other than it really is” (2002: 23).
Figure 1: Kanizsa Triangle
The triangle which was named after Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa in 1955,
Kanizsa Triangle, is a classic sample for illusory forms. Although there seem no explicit
lines to indicate such a triangle, the image above shows a white triangle that can be clearly noticed. “The interior of the triangle generally appears brighter than the ground, even though it is not” (Nieder, 2002: 250). Thus, the main focus is on the fact that we believe that we see something that does not exist in reality. When it comes to check the reality of a belief, it is also possible to define illusions as the juxtaposition of reality or “an idea or belief that is not true, something that is not really what it seems to be” 2. It is a broad term to deal with because illusions are so common and dispersed in all walks of life. That is why, after presenting an overall background information, the scope of the study will be limited to find out the illusions in Post-colonial context.
As mentioned above, despite the fact that illusions are the beliefs that are far from or contradicting reality, they can be claimed to show up from the very beginning of human
life, in the “Mirror Stage” suggested by Jacques Lacan. At this stage, the infant, who feels a unity with the mother from the moment s/he was born, sees the reflection on the mirror and realizes that there is a separate self apart from his/her mother. There is no perception of self, before the mirror stage:
“mirror self-reflection, that is, the illusory functioning of symmetrical reflexivity, of reasoning by the illusory principle of symmetry between self and self as well as between self and other, a symmetry which subsumes all difference within a delusion of a totalizable, unified and homogenous individual identity” (Felman, 1980: 51).
The image of self is formed upon seeing the reflection, because it is the first encounter of the infant with his/her appearance. This is named as “the founding moment of the imaginary mode, the belief in a projected image” (Gallop: 1982, 121). Lacan claims that “this development is lived like a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history” (1966: 97). The baby, who recognizes his/her separate self, is awakened from the illusion of unity, and his/her individuation process begins.
All through the life, illusions are present in every domain of people, and the reason for the illusions’ existence and being so common is mostly believed as deception. Gerato suggests that “since pleasure cannot be found in reality, one turns to imagination, which is the source of both hope and illusion” (1976: 121). The realities are hard to cope with at times. Thus, there is a tendency to cover them up through illusions. However, in order to have a healthy mind and a balanced life, the real should be distinguished from the imaginary; or the true reality form the false reality or illusionary. Gerato discerns between these two forms of realities as:
“the true reality, or the world in which we live (nature), and the false reality, which is the world of illusion. The first is characterized by the life of man, who is doomed to suffering and pain; the second is characterized by our aspirations and ideals which, even though they will never be fulfilled, at least bring to man temporary joy and relief” (1976: 124).
Jean Baudrillard, who came up with a ground-breaking theory in his book,
Simulacra and Simulation deals with the concept of reality. Since simulacrum is also
based on the same false reality of illusions and shelters the same question of how real reality is, Baudrillard’s ideas on simulacra should also be pointed. The two terms used by Baudrillard are based on the same idea of false reality. Simulacrum’s definition is basically “something that looks like or represents something else3”, and Baudrillard defines simulation as “different from a fiction or lie in that it not only presents an absence
as a presence, the imaginary as the real, it also undermines any contrast to the real, absorbing the real within itself” (Poster, 1988: 6).
Baudrillard’s argument is based on the fact that there is nothing like real anymore, because real has been replaced by the signs. He claims that “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (1994: 2). He emphasizes the artificiality and claims that it is difficult to distinguish artifice from reality.
“The act of simulation is one in which there is no longer any reference to reality, instead what we have is a simulation that is generated without allusion to something real, but rather to a code or model that finds its origins outside of concrete reality” (Haladyn et al, 2010: 263).
Baudrillard believes that all the established notions of thought are shattered in our age, and there is a cultural shift in the formations of societies through post-modernity. He argues in The Precession of Simulacra that “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential Being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1994: 1). He concludes that absolute truth cannot be reached because everything around us is hyperreal and part of an illusion.
Baudrillard defines three orders of simulacra to make his argument clear. In the first order, “the counterfeit is the dominant scheme of the “classical” epoch, from the Renaissance to the industrial revolution.” (Baudrillard: 1988, 135) It is the period before the modern world in which images are just illusions or the imitations of reality. The second order is associated with the Industrial Revolution, and it is called “production” (Baudrillard: 1988, 135). It is at this order that a breakdown between the representation and the image starts. Baudrillard shows the industrial developments like mass production as the reason for the misrepresentation of reality. Though difficult, there is still some hope to reach the reality at this order. In the last order; however, “simulation is the dominant scheme of the present phase of history, governed by the code” (Baudrillard: 1988, 135). People in the post-modern culture are confronted with a hyper-real at this order. The reality with its traditional sense is wiped out completely, and people are left with the virtual. The hyper-reality forms a “new linguistic condition of society, rendering impotent theories that still rely on materialist reductionism or rationalist referentiality” (Baudrillard: 1994, 2). Baudrillard puts the blame on the media and mass-communication tools as the agencies that help hyper-real dispersed into our lives. At the third order,
representation and reality cannot be distinguished because there only exists the simulacrum.
In his book, Republic-Book VII, Plato, whose cave allegory sets up the base of illusions, explains how the way reality and illusions are perceived may change depending on the situation people are in. In this allegory, there are some prisoners whose legs and feet have been fettered since their childhood. They do not move, even cannot turn their heads and just remain in their places, so they just see the same things all the time. They are like puppets whose strings are out of their control. There is also a fire behind them and that is why, they can only see the shadows reflected on the wall. “The prisoners deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects” (Plato, 1941: 748). In the case of the release of one of the prisoners, he cannot see anything clearly since his eyes are used to dark, nor can he distinguish the real objects whose shadows he has seen for so long. When the prisoner is told what he has seen all those times is in fact “all a cheat and an illusion” (Plato, 1941: 748), but it is difficult to persuade him to believe in this. He might even try to escape to the darkness because sunlight hurts his eyes. If the prisoner is exposed to sunlight for some time, there begins “habituation” (Plato, 1941: 748). In a period of time, the prisoner, who gets used to the day and night times, begins to see the differences between the real objects and the shadows and discern the reality from the illusion. He perceives the seasons, sun, nature and the real objects in a different way from the ones he used to believe in the cave. When he is put back into the cave, since the illusions are peeled off, the man’s senses and his perception cannot be the same with the others.
The shadows which are accepted real by the prisoners and the reality lying outside the cave as the opposite turns out to be the same illusion as the colonized ones experience. Just like the prisoner that leaves the cave in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and questions the reality of the shadows he has seen for so long, the colonizers’ pseudo reality strengthens their being “other” in the colonized world. Surrounded by the unreal illusions, the colonized ones end up by giving themselves up to the consensus of the majority. It is not the case all the time, for sure. When they adapt themselves to their new living places, they start to see the shadows as real or they believe in this simulacrum. If they cannot, they suffer from such troubles as alienation, estrangement and turn into beings with no sense of belonging. They can neither adapt themselves to the new society, see themselves as a member of the newly emerged living conditions, nor can they go back and feel belonging to their deserted home.
Emigration, the struggle for independence, national identity, otherness and resistance are the common themes in Post-colonial literature; however, at the core of all these in fact, there is an illusion. The first and the foremost important illusion is that the colonizing culture distorts the realities and experiences for the sake of constructing an essential on which they can build their power and make the colonized believe in it. In post-colonial context, it is not surprising to see this peace building activity. The colonizer attempts to conceal the conflicts and to cover the fact that they violate the basic rights of colonized ones. What the colonizer attempts to do is to try to make the colonized ones believe that they are being protected, developed, even supported to become more civilized and have better conditions through the policies of the colonized. For simplifying the task of colonization, they deny the existence of differences and try to degrade them to a single power. It seems to be giving a sense of unity in the culture; however, the denial and ignorance of the indigenous people’s diversity, traditions and roots destroy or damage the identities of the colonized people. The colonizer, which might be described as the controlling power, tries to achieve it by totalizing; following the idea of John Frow: “One out of many” and by establishing national myths, the colonizer aims at reaching full control over the Others.
The “otherness” is also a common theme in Post-colonial writing. Since the colonized are the minorities, they are literally excluded from or pushed aside in the society. Furthermore, they are not only “other” from the colonizing power, they also have diverse backgrounds and pasts that make them “other” to one another. Starting from being “other”, another illusion that should be noted in this context comes to the foreground. That is, every immigrant has a strong belief for a better life; they believe that when they move to another place, they will earn much money; they will be happier; they will find what is lacking in their own places. The urge to get the opportunity for these dreamy realities, and this illusion might turn out to be the main motive for them to leave their soil.
In pursuit of independence, money, education facilities and all the other things included in a better life, the target lands in the colonies become desirable because the world presented before their eyes is the one which Baudrillard explains in his “Simulacra
and Simulation”. In post-colonial period, just like the shadows in the cave or the illusions
created by the colonizers, after the colonial power is gone, “only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models” (Baudrillard, 1988: 166). In this way, Baudrillard focuses on the manipulative effects of these illusions. Just
like the ones in Plato’s cave allegory, the people in the modern life are left with the realities through the lenses of media. He mentions that “information is beginning to circulate everywhere at the speed of light” (Baudrillard, 1988: 193). The easy accessibility, non-reliability of the oriented information enforces Baudrillard’s idea that there is no reality any longer.
This study will contextually be based on Post-colonial writing; however, it is noteworthy to give brief information about Hong Kong as the colony of England because it is a setting that is studied in the frame of Post-colonial context as well as the subject matter of this dissertation. As it has been the case for many other countries throughout ages, the reason why Hong Kong was in Britain’s demand was economic. “The British and the rest of the European nations faced an economic catastrophe by the end of Eighteenth Century since China’s economy had little or no need of European goods” (Pineda, 2012: 5). Britain was after Chinese tea, but the Qing Dynasty that governed China had no interest in buying other British goods; they demanded silver or gold in exchange for the tea, which has been a distinctive habit in British culture. However, in the reserves of British market, there was not enough silver to trade with Qing Empire. “The solution for Europe was to pay in as little silver they had to, and to use opium at its coin of exchange” (Wallerstein, 1974). Therefore, the British government exported opium from the British-colonized India to China where opium would be exchanged for tea. As it became easier and common to find opium, it led to a number of problems on a larger scale. As a result of opium’s effect, a generation of addicts showed up between 1790 and 1832 in China. The society was “experiencing an opium crisis, with its military forces suffering direct impacts from their addictions” (Szczepanski, 2018). The social turmoil caused by the opium use and China’s official ban for foreign opium in 1836 lead to disagreements between Qing government and British merchants. British Empire’s military respond ended up with the start of Opium Wars. As Peter Ward Fay defines: “The Opium War of 1839 was the first large scale military conflict between the Qing Empire and western imperial powers” (Fay, 1998). Having hard times due to the Opium Wars, China not only ceded Hong Kong Island to Britain; it opened the path to many other economic pressures from the other European countries because of its military weakness, as well. After the war, “The British were given the island of Hong Kong and trading rights in the ports of Canton and Shanghai” (Tao He, n.d). For over a century, Hong Kong remained as the British colony, and it became an important trade center. Later on, it was returned to China with the signing of the Joint Declaration in 1997. Hong Kong started
its post-colonial period after this time. “Although British imperialism never politically took hold in mainland China, as it did in India or Africa, its cultural and political legacy is still evident today” (Tao He, n.d). In other words, Hong Kong became officially rebounded to China as it was before; however, although the city is not a British colony any more, the way of life and people who live there still carry the signs of British Empire.
As it was the case for Hong Kong and other colonies, it should be recounted that at the core of colonialism, there lays the exploitation of the weak by the superior one. Through economic and social policies, the colonial power intends to oppress and force the other nations in the colonies to submit to their sovereign. Overall, the colonizing power treats the colonized ones as inferior economically, culturally and socially; on the other hand, the colonizer has to make these minorities believe that it is for their welfare to live in this way. Systematically, the superior power creates illusions to manipulate these nations’ perception of newly emerged and made-up societies as “whole” or “united”. In this way, the colonizers guarantee their authorities over the colonized subjects and keep the right to govern them in their hands.
Having covered the theoretical background of the dissertation, the following parts are intended to focus on tracing these themes in Timothy Mo’s fiction. However, the autobiographical assets of the writer are also worth mentioning, because the writer is bearing the traces of Post-Colonial conditions not only in his life, but in his literary works, as well.
Timothy Mo, who is an Anglo-Chinese writer, has an English mother and a Cantonese father. He was born and got his primary education in Hong Kong and then left for England. Due to his Chinese family roots and his upbringing in England, he experienced the life through the mingling of cultures himself. Coming from an Anglo-Chinese background, he focuses on colonization, domination, imperialism and the related Post-colonial subjects. He writes about the immigrant experiences and the dislocated and unrooted immigrants in the colonized world. As he claims in an interview with him “what I write about, is the clash of cultures, the war of civilizations” (Jaggi, 2000). In his novels, Mo uses protagonists who are strong, and the way he portrays the characters takes them from merely drawn characters to being individuals and makes them symbolize the individuals in cultural conflicts. The settings of his novels, which will be studied in the following parts of this study in detail, also draw a picture of the conflict between colonial and post-colonial realms. Parallel features of his fictional settings and real places are easy to spot in his novels.
Timothy Mo has been an important figure in the contemporary British literature because he made a remarkable change on the map of literary fiction of his time with the publications of his novels. While there were writers like Sam Selvon, Salman Rushdie, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul and Kazuo Ishiguro who wrote about the minorities, Mo made the readers aware of a fiction overseas. The Redundancy of Courage (1991) can be referred to as a fictional account of the events following the invasion and occupation of East Timor by Indonesia. In Renegade or Halo2 (1999), the story of Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro’s journey all over the world and his encounter with different cultures are narrated. Sour Sweet (1982) is also based on familial relations, Chen and Lily’s immigration to London from China and the turmoil they experience as foreigners. Finally, his prize winning first novel, The Monkey King (1978) is a novel set in colonial Hong Kong. The plot of the novel turns around the tensions between Wallace Nolasco and his father-in-law Mr. Poon, Nolasco’s attempts to gain acceptance and freedom from Mr. Poon’s oppressions and his departure to Mainland China.
Overall, almost all Mo’s novels are based on the theme of being an outsider. The characters have individual challenges because of their search for an accepted identity in the society they were attached. Also, they are not only oppressed by their families, they are socially forced to live in a different way from the host people who live in that society, as well. The basic themes of Post-Colonial literature, namely, the immigrant psychology and the harsh conditions they have to put up with can be detected in Timothy Mo’s works. The aim of this dissertation is to display the illusions and juxtapositions lying under these Post-colonial themes in Timothy Mo’s fiction. Since the novels included in this study are the works written either in post-colonial realm or about the troubles of the characters stemming from post-colonial issues, the argument will be studied further through the references from Timothy Mo’s fiction.
